ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum presents the first American museum exhibition to focus on the painting practice of Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher. The centerpiece of Morgan Fisher: Conversations is a new painting installation based on temporary structures Fisher has created to reflect aspects of the architectural plans for the AAM’s Shigeru Ban-designed future home, scheduled to open in 2014. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a comprehensive new essay by AAM Curator Jacob Proctor, as well as a collection of interviews and conversations—some published here for the first time—conducted with the artist over the last 30 years.
Morgan Fisher first achieved widespread recognition in the early 1970s for a body of experimental films that deconstructed the language of cinema, both as physical material and as a set of production methods and technical procedures. Fisher’s films collectively reveal aspects of the medium that conventional films make a point of concealing, including such elements as the camera and other equipment, the presence of production assistants and director, the editing process, even the standard length and gauge of the film stock itself.
Since the late 1990s, Fisher has focused his attention on the problems and possibilities of painting—questioning and reframing the subtle conventions of the medium with a rigorous self-reflexivity equal to that of his film work. Fisher’s paintings and painting installations investigate systems of perspective and color relations; the shape, thickness, and orientation of each painting; the position of the viewer; and, especially, the relationships between paintings or groups of paintings and the architectural spaces that they occupy.
Morgan Fisher was born in 1942 in Washington, D.C. He lives and works in Santa Monica, California. His work has been exhibited internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at the Generali Foundation, Vienna; Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Raven Row, London; and Portikus, Frankfurt. A retrospective of Fisher’s films appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2006. His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
